“He’s a little bollix sometimes,” Susanna said. “And Tom’s parents don’t help. They let him get away with anything, and when they see us making him behave, they’re all, ‘Oh, leave him alone, boys will be boys!’ And you know what Hugo’s like, ‘Just let them run wild, they’ll turn out fine in the end’—which was great when it was us, but it’s not as much fun from the other side.”
I didn’t point out that that part of the problem, at least, was likely to take care of itself fairly soon. I wasn’t interested in discussing Zach’s issues. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw your dad,” I said.
I realized almost instantly, from the surprised silence, that I had put my foot in it. I rummaged frantically in my mind for whatever I was missing; all I could come up with was calling Uncle Phil when I got completely hammered and lost my wallet at some teenage disco and Hugo wasn’t answering his phone, the wry look on his face in the car as he advised me to be very quiet on my way into my house, but obviously I had seen him since then—
“But they were here at Christmas,” Susanna said. “Remember? They gave Zach that dagger thing, and he stabbed the sofa?”
“Oh,” I said. The sharp, intent way she was looking at me, like something was just dawning on her, made my gut clench. “Duh. I guess my mind was on other stuff at Christmas, I had like a lot on at work? and all the Christmases kind of blur together, right, specially since a lot’s happened—” Leon snorted, just loudly enough to be obvious. The sofa-stabbing didn’t sound like the kind of thing that would blur easily.
“You,” Susanna said, with finality, “are drunk.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I really am.” I was so grateful to her for the out, so pierced by her infinitely kind and innocent world where nothing worse than a few mimosas could possibly be wrong with anyone’s mind, I could have cried.
“Give me that,” Leon said, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve had plenty.” The arch of his eyebrow at me said What with the other stuff.
“I have, yeah. And I’m planning to have plenty more.”
“Melissa’s such a lucky girl. Is she staying here too?”
I shrugged. My heart was hammering: sooner or later I was going to really fuck up, say or do something so moronic that no amount of na?veté could gloss over it, I should never have come here— “For a few days, yeah.”
“Doesn’t want you out of her sight?”
“What can I say, dude. She likes my company. Your guy didn’t make it, no?”
“Carsten’s got a job. He can’t just take off whenever he feels like it.”
“Ooo. He sounds important.”
“I wish this was over,” Leon said, suddenly and fiercely. “I know that’s awful, but I do. What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to pretend it’s not happening? There should be a manual.”
“I bet in some cultures there is,” Susanna said, taking the bottle off him. “Rituals you do, when someone’s dying. Chants. Dances. Burning herbs.”
“Well, I wish I lived there. Shut up”—to me, when I rolled my eyes—“I do. What you’re supposed to do after someone dies, that’s all mapped out, wakes and funerals and wreaths and the month’s-mind mass. But the part where you’re waiting for them to die is at least as bad, and there’s fuck-all to tell you how to do that.”
“Speaking of when it’s over,” Susanna said. “Does anyone know what happens to the house, afterwards?”
There was a small, intricate silence. Leon pulled a stem of jasmine off the wall and spun it between his fingers, not looking at either of us.
“I mean, it might not come to that,” Susanna said. “We’re getting a second opinion. But if.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Is it not a bit early to, to go divvying up his stuff?”
Both of them ignored that. Leon said, “Granddad and Gran’s will said Hugo gets to live here.”
“And then what?”
“You mean,” Leon said, “is it going to be sold.”
“Yeah.”
“Not if I get a say in it.”
“Well, obviously,” Susanna said, with a touch of exasperation. “What I’m asking is if anyone knows whether we do get a say. If it goes to our dads, and they want to sell it and split the money . . .”
Another silence, this one longer. This whole issue had never occurred to me, and I had no idea what I thought about it. It sounded like Susanna and Leon were not just set on hanging on to the place but also taking it for granted that I felt the same way, although I had no idea what they thought we would do with it: rent it out? share it, all of us together in one great big happy commune, taking turns to cook lentils and tie-dye organic hemp? A few months back I would have been all for selling up—any fraction of the house would have been a big step towards that white Georgian overlooking the bay—but now that whole daydream stabbed like a humiliating joke, it made me feel like one of those deluded caterwaulers babbling about superstardom on The X Factor. It was made worse by the paranoid sense that the other two were thinking things I wasn’t in on, invisible signals zipping back and forth past my face like insects; I felt like an unwanted outsider, like they would be happier if I made some vague excuse and went inside, or even better if I hauled my bags into another taxi and drove straight back to my apartment.
“Can’t you ask your dad what the story is?” Leon said to Susanna. He had taken his lighter out and was flicking the flame at the jasmine stem, blowing it out when it caught.
“Why can’t you ask yours?”
“Because you’re closer to yours.”
“Just because we live in the same country doesn’t mean we’re close.”
“It means you see him. Which makes it an awful lot easier to casually slip the question into conversation, oh by the way Dad, do you happen to know—”
“Hello? You’re right here. You’re actually living with yours.”
Leon blew out the jasmine viciously. “Which means I’ve got more than enough on my plate right now, thanks, without—”
“And I don’t?”
“Why don’t you do it?” Leon said to me. “You’re just sitting there, assuming one of us will—”
I was finding this bickering weirdly comforting, actually, with its familiarity and its implication that I wasn’t the persona non grata here, that maybe everyone was just stressed and out of joint. “I’m living with Hugo,” I pointed out. “I can’t exactly ask him: hey, Hugo, just wondering, when you kick the bucket—”
“You could ask your dad.”
“You’re the one who brought it up. If you’re so desperate to know—”
“You’re not?”
“Of course he’s not,” Susanna said. “Duh.”
“What’s the big deal?” I demanded. “We’ll find out when he dies, what difference does it—”
“If he dies—”
“All right,” Leon snapped. “I’ll do it.”
Both of us turned to look at him. He shrugged, against the wall. “I’ll ask my dad.”
“OK,” Susanna said, after a moment. “You do that.”
He dropped the jasmine on the terrace and twisted his heel on it. “I will.”
“Wonderful,” Susanna said. “So we can quit bickering. I have to listen to that all day long; I don’t want to do it too. Is Oliver still going?”
I cocked an ear towards the door. “Yep. ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”
“Jesus,” Leon said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Give me that bottle back.”
Susanna let out a breath precariously near to laughter or tears. “Last night she came to me,” she sang softly, “my dead love came in . . .”
Oliver’s voice, eroded to veil-thinness by distance, fell on hers like an echo. My dead love came in . . . Out over the grass, among the Queen Anne’s lace and the leaves.
“Oh, perfect,” Leon said, and tilted the bottle to his lips. “Let’s all see how morbid we can get.”
Susanna hummed a few bars of some tune I couldn’t put my finger on, till Leon let out a snap of laughter and sang along, in a tenor that was surprisingly rich coming out of someone so slight: “Isn’t it grand, boys, to be bloody well dead? Let’s not have a sniffle—”